W hen I grew up in the Texas Panhandle, people could tell a lot about you based on your responses to a few questions. Part of getting to know someone involved questions like, “Are you saved?” “Band or football?” and “Ford or Chevy?” To Hispanic people, there were further questions: “Flour or corn?” and “Do you attend the Spanish Mass or the English one?” These questions were about more than Jesus, high school, or trucks, or tortillas or parish membership. They were about identity: Showing your preference sorted you into a social group.
Now I am a Ph.D. student at an R1 university. I study philosophy. Without admitting it, academics subject each other to the same sorts of questions. We ask, “So, what kind of research are you into?” Discerning ears listen for hints. “Hume,” ah yes, an analytic philosopher. “De Beauvoir,” oh, we got ourselves a Continental philosopher. And there are many other labels, even outside of philosophy. For example: “Cognitive behavioral therapy or psychodynamic?” “Criminal or corporate law?” “Hospital or private practice?” Each set has more options as well.
Welcome to The Chronicle’s first special report devoted to age diversity on campuses. This annual issue also features compelling personal essays dealing with identity and disability — be sure to check them out.
Recently, labels about race and gender have prompted controversy in academe. As much as academics (and especially philosophers) would like to think, we are not above social cues for identity, virtue signaling, or taking party lines. Moreover, we often dupe ourselves into thinking that what distinguishes our in-groups from others’ out-groups is that our groups have Truth — that we are grounded by more than individual or social preference. Unchecked, this can spawn insidious problems: we create caricatures of out-groups, we halt deep conversation about our own values and worldviews, and we appeal only to reason or identity or passion instead of the whole person and the whole system that trains those persons. People and their beliefs are more complicated than abstract Truth allows us to address.
Full disclosure: When I fill out applications, I check boxes next to “Hispanic” and “Parents did not graduate college.” That has benefited me with many scholarships, fellowships, and positions. And people call me out on this because I look like a normal white dude. What they do not see is that every day when I walk through red-brick buildings with ornate cornerstones, I feel like a fraud. Fortunately, I do not get harassed, assaulted, or excluded for any of my identifications. But some of my friends do. For me, and many others, identity has real physical, psychological, and economic implications.
So we get uneasy when we see someone who does not identify as something start to talk about that group. For example, if I see rich, white, straight men from the suburbs comment on poverty, blackness, queerness, or systemic oppression, I am initially skeptical. The skepticism is magnified if they hold a Ph.D. or a tenure-track job. The frequent and infuriating scenario, for me and others, is that these people make our lives harder. This happens if they do nothing to change the status quo but conceal this when they signal that they are open or use catch-phrases like “critical race theory,” “queer theory,” or “carceral studies” on their CVs.
H ow does this harm? They answer the job postings, and, since they share the same lineage of the old, dead, white dudes of philosophy’s past, they look familiar to the hiring committees. They get hired because, deep down, they relieve the hiring committee’s concerns that they might actually have to change something. They take academic appointments dedicated to underrepresented issues, and someone who would modify the status quo gets excluded. Worse still, they might do shoddy research about underrepresented groups by never getting feedback from the studied group, never letting its members speak for themselves at conferences or in publications, or never expanding scholarship beyond the old, dead, white, male canon to the centuries of material written by the disenfranchised. And because they eventually get a fancy chair and academic title, their misinformed opinion is taken as gospel.
I am not interested in evaluating intentions or allocating praise or blame. I just want improvement. I want people to stop assaulting trans folk and for them to be able to get adequate medical care. I want cops to stop killing black children in the streets. I want women not to feel trapped in abusive relationships because of economic pressures. I want people who need to escape mortal dangers in other countries to come to America with their families and to live without fear of ICE. What makes me a philosopher of a certain stripe is that I think philosophy can help with all these problems. I teach the traditional canon, but I also make space for underrepresented voices. And when I do not know about something, I shut up and find someone who does. Most crucially, when I make a mistake, as I often do, I own it, analyze it, and try never to do that thing again.
If academics want to be competent, then they need to shut up and listen.
Academe has to change. If we take any of these issues seriously, we need to make sure we are tenuring people from underrepresented groups, not merely tallying our undergrads and displaying our diversity rankings. We have to clear shelves in our libraries and slots on our schedules for people to tell their stories for themselves, not merely extrapolate from hypothetical persons, thought experiments, or celebrities. We have to stop pretending like we can have merely disinterested, rational conversations about empirical, passionate, and life-or-death situations.
As long as people write about how the left engages in damaging identity politics, or epistemic insiderism, they miss the point. If academics want to be competent, then they need to shut up and listen. And if they publish on something they have zero personal stake in, they need to educate themselves intensely, ensuring they understood what has already been said.
My friends and I are not your tokens.
I am OK with your talking about issues that affect me. But do your homework. Engage in a little imagination. See how your good intentions falling from academic heaven might actually, by the time they reach us, be more mud and muck for our daily trudges. And please, please do not tell us you are helping us if you do not even listen to us.
Glenn Trujillo Jr. is a doctoral student in philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
